


Strangers – Sigrid

by JupiterOrchid



Series: Crash Landing; Song-fic fix-it [2]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drama & Romance, Everyone is even more sad, F/M, M/M, Maria is not that bad, No Happy Endings For Anyone, Songfic, Unhealthy Relationships, maybe? - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:21:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23182402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JupiterOrchid/pseuds/JupiterOrchid
Summary: She never thought of herself as a selfish person. Impulsive, eccentric… not selfish.This is part 2/6 in my fix-it song-fic series where I can't leave that finale well enough alone and have to make sense of what the fuck Michael is doing. This ain't your grandma's songfic but it still counts..?
Relationships: Maria DeLuca/Michael Guerin, Michael Guerin/Alex Manes
Series: Crash Landing; Song-fic fix-it [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1665295
Comments: 2
Kudos: 34





	Strangers – Sigrid

Music was playing at the Wild Pony even though it was empty, hours still to go until opening. Maria was at the bar, wiping the counter to the beat of the music, almost subconsciously. This was her favourite time of day; these few hours before opening. Polishing the wooden counter, preparing the garnishes, filling up the ice well – the calm before the nightly storm. She couldn’t always organize her life but she could organize her bar and she loved it – _her_ bar – this legacy, passed on to her like a baby that, although it may have been unwanted, you couldn’t help but love. Love it because it was where you were needed, where you had to be.

It was easy to believe in it _then_ , when things unravelled so quickly. Rosa died, Liz couldn’t stay, Alex was gone, and her mom… her mom took a turn: wandered onto the dust-covered street barefoot, in her nightgown, following an apparition no one else could see. Maria had to stay. Roswell was her home and she was needed there. She had no reason to leave, she told herself, no reason good enough to go where she wasn’t needed, where she might not be wanted. She never thought of herself as a selfish person. Impulsive, eccentric… not selfish. She took over the bar, she took care of her mom, she stayed where her home was, where she was needed. That was selfless. And that was okay, it was good.

But when Liz and Alex came back, she watched them fall back into Roswell like they never left. They fell back into their old lives like in a movie, like a dream, reaching for things in Roswell she never had, even after a decade of staying. She had to admit then that maybe she needed to add another adjective to her profile: fretful. It started to feel like she hid behind this image of selflessness like behind a barricade, driven not by wanting to do the right thing but by being afraid. Afraid of reaching for something, afraid of risking something, afraid of falling into something.

Of course, then, she suddenly _was_ falling, tumbling onto the dessert sand with Michael Guerin of all people. And it felt good, to tumble, to be really reckless, really impulsive. At least for that moment. The next day, she didn’t regret it, per se, but she didn’t feel anything special either. It was just a night. It was just Guerin. There was nothing there.

When she found out that Guerin was Alex’s mystery guy she felt guilt and shame, but secretly, there was also excitement. She couldn’t help it, she didn’t want it, but suddenly, the fact that Michael was Alex’s swoon-worthy, awe-inspiring, heart-eyes-inducing crush made her look at Guerin in a different light. Maybe all these years, she didn’t _really_ see him. Maybe she didn’t see past the booze haze and the general ‘I-give-up’ vibe but she was looking now, and she was seeing something else. She was tired of treading lightly, tired of tiptoeing around people who left her, tired of being scared and careful. She wanted to fall recklessly, to tumble into it without thinking, to reach for something tangible. She wasn’t going to. She wasn’t going to do that to Alex.

But when Michael walked into the Wild Pony, with his eyes shining and his hand healed, and played guitar and kissed her and promised her they would talk… it was like a movie: feeling so right, unfolding so perfectly. Maria couldn’t turn away, couldn’t tamp down this want within her even though she knew it was selfish, even though she knew it wasn’t right.

Now Alex wasn’t speaking to them. That wasn’t exactly a fair characterization. He said ‘hi’ and even smiled whenever he saw her or Michael, but he didn’t come by the Pony or the Crashdown and he was always somehow busy whenever Maria and Liz reached out, wanting to see him.

They talked about her and Michael exactly once. Two days after Michael came by the Wild Pony and played guitar for her, she went up to the Cabin. Alex checked the window first and then, after what seemed like an unusually long amount of time, opened the door. He didn’t invite her in. Instead he hobbled out onto the porch and closed the door behind him. He wasn’t wearing his prosthetic, moving around on crutches, wearing a pair of old sweats and a grey Air Force sweater that was way too big for him.

He smiled at her, saying: “Hey Maria. What are you doing here?” but she looked him over and saw right through the chipper tone. His hair was a mess, his smile didn’t reach his eyes, and his eyes were puffy and red-rimmed as if he was crying or didn’t sleep or both. He was drowning in his clothes, looking way younger than his twenty-eight.

Looking back, that was probably the first sign that she was doing something wrong but that’s not what she ended up feeling when she left.

“I came to talk to you,” she told him, and he led the way to the bench on the porch. They sat down.

“What about?” he asked, not sounding like he wanted to know. He rested his crutches on the side of the bench.

“Michael came to the Pony yesterday,” Maria started, and Alex looked away.

“I know,” he said, to her surprise. “We don’t need to talk about it. What Michael does is none of my business.”

“Alex,” Maria tried but he interrupted her.

“Seriously,” he said, his voice a little more stern. “It’s fine. I don’t need to hear it. I just want you two to be happy.”

He looked at her then and he looked like he meant it. Despite everything else, he looked like he meant it, like he was sincere. It was easy to do the wrong thing. It was easy to believe in Alex’s sincerity because it was so real. It was easy to take that sincerity and pretend it absolved her of everything, absolved her of her selfishness, of her willingness to be a bad friend. Just. This. Once.

But she saw now that it wasn’t just a matter of selfishness, it wasn’t just about being a bad friend. Her and Michael… There was a brokenness to their foundation, straight from the beginning, a fragility, an unevenness. They collided like they were two minds, blindfolded by pain and loneliness. There was something desperate in the way they clung to each other at night, something desperate in the way they tried to fuse their bodied into one, trying to find a way to open each other up and live in the skin of the other. To get back that little bit of movie magic that they had that first night or that day Michael came to the Pony. It’s as if Maria forgot that movies end on a happy ending but life… it goes on. And this life didn’t go on the way it happened in the bar. It went on the way it was built, following the contours of its foundation in jagged, uneven lines.

Michael never told her what happened to his hand and she never asked. There were things they didn’t talk about. The hand was one. Isobel’s stint in rehab and Noah’s disappearance, another. And they never, ever talked about Alex Manes. Unless someone else mentioned him. At first, Maria would tell Michael if she saw him in town. She thought maybe they could work past this and eventually come to all be friends but if the haunted look Michael got every time Alex was mentioned was anything to go by, that was one hell of a pipe dream.

Maria tried to work through it. She even tried to start the conversation once or twice, but Michael refused to talk. He wasn’t harsh or cruel about it, just told her: “it’s in the past, babe” and she tried to nod along and not feel bothered by it. Tried not to feel jealous about the way Michael seemed to almost protect his past with Alex. It still left a sour taste in her mouth.

Alex was one thing they didn’t talk about, but it seemed like it wasn’t the only thing. Three months in, she still felt like they were strangers, just pretending that they had something real. As time passed, they didn’t become closer, they just seemed to be getting better at pretending.

She didn’t notice at first. Being together felt good. There was a warmth there, a comfort, but she caught on eventually. There were silences in between the words they spoke to each other, blank spaces in the things she learned about Michael, secrets in his hushed conversations with Max and Isobel and even Liz. Eventually, the loneliness started to creep in around the corners. As Michael held her in the night, often she felt like he wasn’t with her. Sometimes, he literally wasn’t with her. Several times she would wake up only to find him gone and back in the morning. She didn’t know where he went. Truth be told, she didn’t want to know, because the things that were good, were great, and the things that weren’t good… they were small. At least they felt small from their place in the silences.

Michael didn’t seem unhappy. Most days he seemed his usual self. Maybe a little less prone to drinking, a little less angry, but generally just himself: smart and warm, a healthy doze of his dark sense of humour. But on the days she would wake up in the night and find him gone, the mornings that he would be back, she could see it: a wall, an emptiness. It was like he wasn’t whole sometimes. Or more like Michael was never whole and she just never noticed, never knew to look, except on those days when it was out in the open, too big for him to hide.

It was on those days that she caught herself thinking: “It could never be us. Just ‘you’ and ‘I’, but never ‘us’.” And still, she stayed. She couldn’t say why she stayed, couldn’t puzzle it out. Maybe it was fear again, maybe selfishness, maybe loneliness. She told herself that time would heal them, time would bring them to “it”, back to that moment they had, to a point where whatever they had now could become real, deep, alive.

It wasn’t very long into their time together that she realized she was wrong about all of it. She saw Alex in the grocery store, standing in the snacks isle. He looked good. Thinner than he was the last time she had a glimpse of him, but generally good: hair combed, eyes clear, skin warm, he was wearing a nice pair of jeans and a white tee under a bomber jacket. He looked the best he had in months.

“Hey,” she greeted him as she walked down the isle.

“Maria,” if she startled him, he didn’t show, “hey.” He smiled, like always. Warm, sincere. Maria used to think that it must’ve somehow meant that Alex didn’t love Guerin anymore. No person could smile like that at someone who stole their love away from them. She didn’t know how she became so good at rationalizing this mess.

“How are you?” Alex asked her, like always and like always Maria listened to his tone, waiting to hear the unspoken “how is Michael?” in it but if Alex ever wondered, he never let on.

“Good,” Maria said, looking at the shelves filled with snacks. Alex was trying to decide on which flavour of jerky to buy. Which means he was probably going out of town, somewhere at least an hour away…

“Are you going somewhere?” she asked suddenly. Alex’s face changed but so slightly that a different person might not have noticed.

“Yes,” he nodded, picking up the Teriyaki flavour, “I picked up an assignment in Holloman.”

Maria could feel her heartbeat pick up.

“You’re moving?” she said, her voice shaking.

“Yes,” Alex nodded.

“When?” she demanded, “For how long? Were you planning on telling us?”

“I’m leaving tonight,” Alex said, not looking at her. “It’s a two-year posting. I was going to tell you. It was all very short notice, I just didn’t get a chance.”

And if it’s was a lie, Maria didn’t call him on it because she was too focused on the panic in her gut, the lightbulb that lit up in her mind, the thought of Michael finding this out after Alex has gone. Suddenly, the world seemed to snap into place for her and she could see everything clearly for the first time since Michael walked into her bar with his hand healed. What she saw was the selfishness. The pain behind Alex’s smiles. The restlessness in Michael’s embrace. The emptiness in their conversations. She saw now, Michael walking out of the door of her house or his trailer, disappearing into the dark. She saw him coming back before dawn, shadows in his eyes, a heaviness to his limbs. She saw her own fear but, also, Michael’s. The way he hid behind what they’ve built up like a wall, the way he replaced one wall for another just to get away from Alex. All because he’s scared. Because love is a risk, the scariest risk of all. As all the pieces slid into place, she realized she didn’t feel any anger. Maybe she should have, because she knews she has been used. Except… she used Michael, too. They made up this dream together, hiding in it, like in a movie. They thought they could pretend, live in this world that wasn’t real until they were… what? Ready for the world?

They could never be ready. Life was not for practice; it was for living. And now they were running out of time.

“Alex,” she started, surfacing up from under her epiphany.

“I’m sorry, Maria,” he said hurriedly, friendly smile plastered on his lips. It was still sincere, but she could see the pain behind it, now, hiding in the coroners of his eyes, in the fold of his lips, the lines in his forehead. “I have to go.”

“Wait,” she called after him, but he was gone before she could even reach out for him.

She knew what she needed to do. She plucked her phone from her back pocket and headed straight to the junkyard.

**Author's Note:**

> I know it's tempting to hate on Maria if you're on the "Alex/Michael is endgame" team. But she was Alex's friend first and she is a good character until the very end. So, how's this for a twist?


End file.
